Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Everyday objects possess the most potent affective power. In their ability to withdraw their familiarity, to defamilarise themselves, ordinary objects constantly hold us to ransom. Through toying with our vested affections, they embody tremendous emotional capital. Adam Farlie's Mourning Light is lightshade as turncoat.

No longer the shedder of light, the familiar assistant with tasks, it instead casts blackness. Only the shade itself is illuminated, outwards. The interior of the lightshade is deathly black - not a flat disc, but a depth of darkness. One can place one's hand - or even one's head - into the void, and become increasingly in the dark. Our yearning for the return of the light's familiar helpfulness is met with nothing but an eternal void, a contrariness, a denial. We are left bereft.

[from Victims. A Work by John Hejduk. Architectural Association. London 1986.]

Guido Reni (17th century), St Sebastian, X-ray carried out as part of conservation by the Auckland City Art Gallery, NZ

Painters see gardens as an issue of values, of colour, light and perspective. This is their right. But there is another way to make gardens which, for the sake of clarity I would call the gardener’s way. This is difficult to explain in words, because it is something very closely linked to the earth, to water, to the sap of plants, to the air, to sunlight, to blowflies and worms … something non-verbal and unreasonable. … It cannot be defined by arguments, or by a ruler and compass. Seen in ground-plan and section form, one of these gardens is very little. I should like to avoid the obligation of drawing it or tracing it out, even with a reed, scratching the earth among manure and flies. Drawn on paper, the garden is an X-ray: the lips, the smile, the clear gaze, the skin, its tepidity, all of this is missing.

Rubió i Tudurí quoted in Eduard Bru (1997). Three on the Site / Tres en el Lugar. Barcelona: Actar, 26-27. (Rubió i Tudurí’s words are from the 1931 report on the Duchess of Gramont’s garden in Vignoleno, Italy, planned in 1931, and originally published in Arquitectura i Urbanisme, Barcelona).